Robert Indiana kept a series of illustrated journals during the late 1950s and 1960s, in which he discusses the development of his work as well as his daily life on Coenties Slip.

In his first entry on this journal page, dated May 3, 1959, Indiana records that he did not get back to Coenties Slip until late afternoon. He describes phoning a friend named Michael, and making plans to meet. 

Indiana returned to the page a year later, on May 3, 1960, recording that he spent a beautiful warm day in Scarsdale (where he taught art classes). Upon returning home he made phone arrangements for two works, Red County and Green County (the latter now Columbus: The Geography of the Memory) to be shown at an exhibition in Scarsdale. He also worked on a "door construction," and next to a sketch of the work he notes adding Bellini cadmium red light stripes on the gesso wings, as "the danger stripes were wanting." Indiana regularly added comments to his journal pages at a later date, here a note added in 1961 states that the door construction became Marine Works. 

Indiana was interested in current events, and often recorded news items in his journal pages. Here he mentions the execution of Caryl Whittier Chessman (a convicted robber and rapist whose writings on death row made him a symbol of the controversy over capital punishment), and that the cemetery Forest Lawn declined his ashes.